Quaranteam: Phil's Tale Ch. 02

But at this point, Phil knew they were going to have to do it sooner rather than later.

The Varmas had assumed control of the project, as was expected, but Phil had still found himself doing more than the lion's share of coordination. The Varmas were brilliant researchers, but they certainly hadn't been working collaboratively for some time, and the level of insidiousness of this virus was beyond anything they'd ever seen before.

It hadn't surprised Phil to see Dev fall into believing the virus from beneath the ice theory, but Charlotte had dismissed that early on, claiming that the DuoHalo virus looked like two different viruses had somehow combined together and then mutated, forming something entirely new from the building blocks of the old.

Two weeks after Varmas had shown up, the government began deploying the early stages of the smokescreen about the lesser virus, Covid, and the more deadly virus, DuoHalo, had managed to slip under the radar, despite a couple dozen fatalities. They'd gotten lucky that those contaminated with DuoHalo in the US seemed to have missed the windows in which they were contagious, and at the moment, it was looking like they had it under control.

Phil refused to be optimistic about it. He knew the danger optimism was going to get him in.

He mostly kept his head down and worked, but he'd also made sure to let himself have the basic human contact he needed to not go crazy. He still went down to the Golfland arcade every Friday night to bash out a few matches with the local fighting game crew. He still went to poker nights on Tuesdays with Andy, Eric and the rest of the guys. But other than the basic touchstones he needed, he ended up finding himself spending more and more time at the base.

"Can I ask you something, Mr. Marcos?" Captain Hayes, no, Linda, asked him late on Thursday evening, as Phil tapped away at his keyboard, having set her copy of James Clavell's "Shogun" down on the couch in his office where she found herself spending more and more time. She'd asked him to call her Linda, since they were spending so much time together, and he'd agreed, as long as she called him Phil, but she was having a lot more trouble with that than he was.

"Linda, if you don't start calling me Phil, I'm going to start calling you Captain again."

She smirked a bit. He liked when she smirked. "Right. Right. But lemme ask you this, Phil -- if the Varmas come up with something to counteract the DuoHalo virus, and you can't solve the problems with the serum, do you think the team's just going to use it anyway?"

Phil sighed, leaning back in his chair, folding his elbow over his eyes. "Probably, those that can, anyway. I mean, it's not like everyone's got a partner here in the office, but those who do could at least start getting inoculated from the damn thing, giving them a bit of protection."

"I mean, that's true, but it's just sex, right? Forgive me for saying this, but I think people around here could stand to have a couple of fuck buddies if it meant it would save their lives," she said, folding one of her legs beneath her.

It was one of the things he liked most about Linda. She always spoke her mind, straight to the point, with no filter, no subtle undertones or subtext. She was all text, direct and to the point, like a bullet. It wasn't that she was always putting her foot in her mouth, either. She knew when to voice her opinion and when not to, but when it came to the two of them, they'd agreed no secrets and no doubletalk, an arrangement that had been working out for both of them.

"Sure," Phil laughed, "but how the hell do you mandate that? 'Attention everyone. From 4-5 every day is now designated Fucking Hour, so pick a partner and get to it! That's an order!'"

Linda laughed, holding her hand over her mouth.

"Besides, there's more than a handful of folks on this base that identify as gay, and I'm certainly not about to go around telling lesbians they just need to accept a little dick in their lives."

"Oh god," Linda said, looking ashen, "I hadn't even thought about how this whole thing wasn't going to protect gay men and women. That's horrible."

He nodded. "Like I've been saying for a month now, we're approaching a workable solution that will help protect a large part of the most at-risk portion of the population, but it doesn't cover everyone and it doesn't protect nearly as many people as I want it to."

"Do you think the stay-at-home order's going to do enough to keep people safe?" she asked him. "I heard the Major General and the Major talking about how that it was likely to happen within the next six to eight weeks, based on projections."

"It'll do a lot," he said with a nod. "DuoHalo's airborne and doesn't last too long outside of the human body, so if we can reduce the amount of human contact for a while, that'll keep us from seeing too many casualties, but you've seen what the attitude's been like in this country for the last few years. I'm only half a decade from forty, and this is the most anti-science I've ever seen this goddamn country, and it's making me sick. People talking about 'the elites' like that's a bad thing. Talking about how they think science is trying to control them. And this utterly insane set of claims that vaccines cause autism, when that's been actively disproven time and time again. In that environment, we're going to come out and tell people to trust the science."

"Jesus," she groaned. "We are so fucked."

"Well," he chuckled, "we as individuals aren't, but we as a country certainly are."

"What about you, Phil?" she said, grabbing her cup of coffee to take another sip from it. "You think maybe you can convince Audrey to be your pair partner, if it comes to it? I've seen the way she looks at you."

Phil tilted his head to one side. "Wait, what? How does she look at me?"

"Oh come on," she groaned. "Don't tell me you haven't noticed. Don't tell me the reason you haven't asked her out is because you haven't noticed, because if that's true, that's just sad, and I mean sad with a capital S-A-D."

The Filipino man chuckled, gesturing at his computer terminal. "Little busy trying to save the species here, maybe you've noticed?"

"It's Thursday, and she's asked you to join her for lunch three times this week already, Phil," she laughed. "Jesus, make the effort, would you?"

"What about you, Linda?"

"What about me, Phil?"

"You got somebody lined up to be your designated fuck buddy, if it comes to that?"

"Oh I'm sure I could probably throw a football down the hall and hit half a dozen people who'd volunteer in this office alone," she sighed. "Not that many of them would be anything more than a sympathy fuck."

"No interest in me, huh?" he said with a grin, meaning it to be a joke.

"Well, tell you what, Phil," Linda shot back. "You, me and Audrey sounds like a nice little threesome, so if you can make that happen, then I guess I'm in."

"I'm going to hold you to that," he teased, knowing they were both kidding.

"Oh don't you worry," she answered. "I'll remind you in case you forget."

The second week in February was when literally everything went to shit, just when everything in Phil's world had felt like it was starting to get better. He was having lunch with both Audrey and Linda in the mess hall when his iPad flashed the emergency alert at him, instructing him to get down to the main portion of the lab designated for detection tests.

Linda and Audrey had insisted on coming with him, and by the time he'd reached the lab, he was already panicked. The red contagion klaxons were lit up, and when he got to the lab, he could see that part of it had already been sealed off, officers standing outside, Charlotte screaming at them at the top of her lungs to let her by.

Dev stood on the other side of the glass.

Along with twelve other men, including McCallister, Bridges, and Wilson.

Major General Fielder moved to intercept Phil before he could get too close to the lab. "Easy there, Dr. Marcos. There's nothing we can do for them now except to buckle down and continue work on our vaccine treatment," the older man said, pressing a hand to his chest, keeping him from moving forward.

"What the fuck happened?"

"One of the sample transport cases apparently wasn't secured, so when they went to open it, the vials came tumbling out, and everyone..." He stopped and sighed, then forced himself to continue. "Everyone in that room is now definitely infected with DuoHalo. We'll need to quarantine them until they're through it or..."

The Major General didn't need to fill that in. Everyone knew what he meant.

The intensity that everyone was working on the project amplified after that, even though that hadn't seemed possible. More than a couple of times, Phil would wander by the quarantine area and see wives, brothers, daughters and sons standing outside of it, talking to their fathers on the other side of the glass. As much as Phil wanted to counsel them, to tell them everything was going to be alright, he couldn't, because he knew he'd be lying to them. Audrey did her best to keep spirits up, the visitors and Phil's, but the minute they had their first casualty on the base -- Hunter Wilson -- it became much harder for everyone to stay optimistic.

Because the day of the first casualty, they lost two more, including Doctor Dev Varma.

Phil spent much of the evening sitting crying on his couch, both Audrey and Linda holding onto him, assuring him that he'd done everything he could do, and that all he could do now was to keep moving forward, keep trying to keep things on task, trying to find a way out of this for all of them. Phil had told Audrey to go and make sure that Charlotte, and the Varma's daughter Asha, were doing okay, but Audrey insisted she'd already delegated that to her assistant, and that since Dev had passed away, Phil was back in charge of the project again, and they needed him at his best.

The weight of the world felt like a million tons, and Phil just wanted the whole thing to go away, but there wasn't time, there was never any time, not any more.

Within a couple weeks, nearly all the men that had been in quarantine had died, and only one person who'd been in the room had survived and come through the other side of it -- Adam McCallister, the former project chief.

All of that meant they had a starting point now, because McCallister's body had developed antibodies, and from there they could begin working on the building blocks of something that would help those uninfected develop those antibodies before ever encountering the virus.

But it also meant that everyone on the base had seen first hand what the DuoVirus could do to a man, to leave him bleeding from the eyes, ears and nose, gasping for his final breath before his lungs collapsed in on themselves. And the survival rate in their sample had been a paltry 8%.

Phil tried convincing Doctor Charlotte Varma to take some time off, to grieve, to mourn, to process the passing of her husband, but the woman was adamant that she wasn't going to let anyone else die on her watch.

The US went into quarantine the last week in February, as there were starting to be reports of both Covid and DuoHalo outbreaks in major metropolitan areas across the country, although Covid was getting most of the headlines at first, simply because everyone had been instructed not to talk about DuoHalo.

But there were confirmed cases of DuoHalo in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Seattle and Houston, and nobody was taking it seriously enough.

The second week in March, they felt like they were ready to test the serum and Nate Campbell's wife Sharon had volunteered to be one of the test subjects.

"You're sure about this, Nate?" Phil asked Nate, as both he and his wife sat in the testing area. "I know you want to get immunity from this like nobody's business, but this serum's still basically experimental, and I don't know how strange the side effects might get. You and your wife are signing up for a hell of a risk with this."

Nate was a pragmatist, and while Phil would've been hard pressed to describe the man as a friend, he was certainly the friendliest member of the original task force. He was a large bulbous man with a history of asthma, which meant he was in the highest risk group. "Phil, I get it, but we're going to need first hand experience of how this is all going to work, and if it stands a chance of getting me immunity to this damn thing, then I need it now, not later." He shook Phil's hand with a smile. "I don't know that I've ever said this, but I'm glad you're in charge these days. You've done a hell of a lot better job managing the team than McCallister ever did, so... thanks for that."

Nate's wife Sharon was an African American woman who also loved to eat a bit more than was good for her, but with the body count starting to skyrocket in the US, they just couldn't afford to wait, so they isolated Nate and Sharon in a room together, injected Sharon with the treatment, and waited.

The idea was that Sharon would wait a day or so and see how the serum affected her, and if it seemed like she was feeling fine at the end of it, she could try and have sex with her husband, and see if it transferred the immunity to him.

That had been the plan, anyway.

Six hours after injection, Sharon had described how she was feeling to the team as "the horniest I've ever been in my fucking life," and it was clear that she was quite worked up, unable to sit still, fidgeting constantly.

The team had instructed her to try and be strong, to try and hold out as long as she possibly could, because they needed to make sure she came through it okay before they wanted to risk her introducing it to Nate.

It had been a great plan, but no plan survives contact with the enemy.

At hour eight, Sharon had basically ripped her clothes off, and the clothes of her husband, shoved him into a chair, climbed atop his lap, and shoved his cock inside of her, giving the man no choice in the matter, as she bounced and bucked.

Phil felt odd, watching the whole thing from the other side of a one-way mirror, but he and the rest of the key members of the team couldn't look away, watching the woman have one of the most intense orgasms they'd ever seen just climbing onto Nate's cock.

Sharon had, at least, had the decency to position Nate's back to the mirror, so they didn't watch the actual penetration, but even with their restricted view, it was some of the most vigorous and carnal sex Phil had ever seen in his life, and he'd watched more than his fair share of porn and hentai.

Nate was clearly at least a little reticent to have sex in front of his colleagues, but Sharon had been merciless, and seemed hellbent on getting her husband to cum. Eventually, Nate didn't have any more resistance and clearly had an orgasm, because it had set off a chain reaction inside Sharon, and the woman had the most intense orgasm Phil had ever witnessed.

As she slumped forward against her husband, she looked completely unconscious, her body limped draped over Nate's body, her head resting on his shoulder, her arms hanging slack down at her sides, as Nate did his best to try and get her to settle in atop of him.

"Is... is she talking in her sleep?" Charlotte said, noting the woman's mouth was moving ever so slightly. "Can you turn up the audio levels?"

That was the first time Phil Marcos heard it, but it certainly wouldn't be the last.

Over and over again, Sharon Campbell was muttering a single word over and over again.

Imprinting...